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If you’re anything like me, you look at your watch, smartphone, computer, or clock to check the time throughout the day. We have the luxury of having plenty of different types of digital and battery operated timepieces to look at, but, watches and clocks use to be made of hundreds of small, intricate parts and it took a lot of work to create, assemble, and prepare them for customers. The Waltham Watch Factory was a local leader in producing high quality watches for more than a hundred years.

The company was first founded in Roxbury by David Davis, Edward Howard, and Aaron Lufkin Dennison in 1850 and then moved to Waltham in 1854. The men worked on building machines that would create identical gears that were so precise, they would be interchangeable with one another. Dennison and Howard would patent these practices and call it the American System of Watch Manufacturing. Their factories would make clocks, watches, speedometers, and many other tools before stopping production in 1957.